Overview of Document Management Software Industry in India

Document Management Software in India is a competitive market, but there are significant opportunities for growth. This article aims to provide a high level overview of key trends and key players.

A simple Google search reveals 20-30 companies offering Document Management Software in India. This indicates a fairly crowded market place. However, these companies can be broadly categorised as follows:

Indian Document Management Software Companies.

There are only 4-5 such players, including names such as Newgen, dmacq, EisenVault, Krystal DMS etc.

These are the key players; whose names appear in sales meetings the most often.

Indian Software Services Companies, for whom Document Management is not necessarily a focus area.

There are a large number of such companies and many of them rank highly on Google due to effective search engine optimisation.

They tend to be software development or outsourcing houses with necessarily having no expertise in Document Management.

Multinational Document Management Software Companies.

These are large international names such as IBM FileNet, OpenText, Documentum etc.

These are pioneers and market leaders in Document Management.

Their offering may be too expensive for the average small or medium sized business in India.

Indian and Multinational Companies for whom Document Management Software is an add-on Service

These include companies that provide physical document storage and management as their primary offering.

These also include printer and scanner hardware companies.

Their main objective is to sell their primary service or product, and a Document Management System usually helps close the sales.

A smart customer should question the provider about their focus on Document Management Software. How large is their team and what kind of customer support do they provide after a sale is complete? Are their experts based in India or abroad? What do they do besides Document Management? These questions would help the buyer make a right choice and get value for their money.

An overwhelming trend in the industry right now is a large push to go digital. And this is further fuelled by the rise of the tech-savvy professional workforce in India as well as by government that is pushing for India to go digital. The main challenge that Document Management companies face today is keeping the cost low enough while providing a superior customer experience.

The other major trend is that Document Management Software alone does not satisfy needs of the Indian customer. It must be bundled with scanning and data entry services, so as to digitise the backlog of physical documents that customers have. For a Document Management company to be successful, they have to have highly efficient project management teams to deliver large and complex digitisation projects on time and within budget.